Like the title tag, the meta description tag belongs inside the <Head> </Head>section of your web
pages. Ordinarily, web-site designers include the meta description tag after the title tag and before the
meta keywords tag, but that’s not set in stone. As long as the meta description tag appears between
the opening and closing head tags, it will be read by crawlers as it should be.When creating your meta description tag, this is what it should look like:<META name=”description” content=”Your description goes here.”>For example, the meta description tag that I might use for my personal web site would look like this:<META name=”description” content=”Technology for consumers.”>It’s important to note that not everyone agrees on the value of the meta description tag. However,
it takes very little time to include this tag (or any of the tags included in this section of the book) in
your web-site coding; therefore, including it should be a given. As with many different strategies in
SEO, these tags are not a sure thing, and they are not the absolute solution to ensuring that your
site ranks well. But they are one more element that could affect your ranking, so including them
should be automatic.Anchor text
Probably one of the most important elements of keyword use is in anchor text.Anchor text is text
found on a given web site that appears to be a hyperlink. Figure 6-4 illustrates how anchor text
appears on a page.Chances are, you see anchor text every day. In fact, anchor text has become such a major inclusion
on web pages that companies often use it without any thought as to how it could affect their search
engine rankings.How you use anchor text does matter, however, because anchor text is one of the most important
search engine ranking factors. When a search engine looks at your web page, it automatically fol-
lows all the links that you have on the page. If those links (or even a large portion of those links)
are text-based links, that’s even better, because then what the search engine sees is not just the link
to another page, but also your keywords. It’s not enough just to make all your links text-based,
however. There’s a fine science to taking advantage of the power of anchor text.The first thing you should understand is that there are two kinds of anchor texts: yours and everyone
else’s. I’m not being facetious here. It really is important that you consider not only how you link
with other people, but also how they will link back to you. For example, if you do a Google search
for the term “click,” you’ll find that the Apple QuickTime web site is at the very top of the list. This
isn’t because Apple loaded down the QuickTime site with the keyword “click.” What’s actually hap-
pened is that many people link to QuickTime using the word “click” in their anchor text. This isn’t
hard to believe, because most web sites that use the QuickTime application usually include a text
link to “Click here to download” or something similar. As you can see, it’s not just your own anchor
text that matters. How your site is included in others’ anchor text is also important.102
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